This is COOL

Camera and projector setup with model




Software and image recognition software




Model inside of software




There's a new software on the street that lets you project an image with a projector onto a model and take a photo, and get a 3D model of the object. And it's name is The Projector-Camera Calibration / 3D Scanning Software. It's a big name, I know. That's really the only name I could find. It was designed by a group of students at the Brown University School of Engineering. The software uses structured light 3D scanning, which seems like a pretty hefty concept but it's not. Let me explain.



So you have a projector casting perfectly straight and parallel bars of light onto an object. What happens when a bar of light is put onto an object that isn't flat? You get distortion. Distortion that can be measured by? A camera. Then the software takes the imgae, looks for these bars of light and uses them to compile a whole bunch of really tiny geometrical shapes that ultimately make the model. Pretty cool, huh? You can get the backside by flipping the model around. Then, the software allows you to stitch the two images together. The more you repeat this process and the more images you take from different angles, the more accurate your image is.

So guess who has all of the stuff to do this? This guy! I definitely want to try this at some point. It's not 100 percent related to my project, but why not? It's about 3D printing. So, if I ever get around to doing that, I'll have to write a blog post about it. So keep posted. It'll be done by me eventually.

By the way, happy New Year! This will probably be the first blog post for my class of 2016, so...

That's that! Thanks for reading.